PhD defence Y. (Yirang) Lim

This thesis intends to explain how smart city development influences the sustainability of the cities. It touches upon the impacts of smart cities theoretically and empirically. It presents the South Korean experience, where the national government strongly promotes smart city development. It provides an overview of smart city development’s positive and negative impacts, whether hypothesized or observed by a systematic literature review. An evaluation index is developed considering economic, environmental, social, governance, and technological dimensions. The result showed more attention is needed to the environmental and governance impacts of smart city development. Hence, this thesis goes deeper into the environmental and governance impacts of smart city development. Since smart cities aim to reduce CO2 emission and energy use, they can contribute to the energy transition to a low-carbon society. To this end, an evaluation index is developed to measure the smart cities’ contribution to the energy transition. As for the governance impact, this thesis identifies governance models from different stages of the development process.

Due to corona, the PhD defences do not take place publicly in the usual way in the Senate Hall or in the Professor Andries Querido Room. The candidates will defend their dissertation either in a small group or online.